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It would be a sad day if we British stopped being cynical, but you sometimes wonder whether we overdo it.

I live a perfectly happy and comfortable life in Blair's Britain, but I can't work up much affection for the culture we've created for ourselves: it's too cynical, too knowing, too ironic, too empty of real value and meaning.

Even modern English people are imperious, superior, ridden by class. All of the hypocrisy and the difficulties that are endemic in being British also make it an incredibly fertile place culturally. A brilliant place to live. Sad but true.

Contemporary Britain seems an endlessly fascinating place to me - but if I knew a little bit more about other places, and other times, maybe it wouldn't.

Although I've been living in the British Virgin Islands for some time now, I have never stopped caring passionately about the U.K. and its great people.

Britain is undoubtedly becoming more cultural. No question of it. People who say it is dumbing down simply don't look around enough. They don't know enough.

I think of myself as being a bit of a wimp deep down - a bourgeois wimp - and I'm fighting that. I think all Brits are, maybe.

If there's one thing above all that sets me apart from Tony Blair it is this - I am not embarrassed to articulate the instincts of the British people.

Although I don't have anything against people from other countries, the higher the influx into England the more the British identity disappears.

There tends to be a jealousy in England towards countries that are successful.